LHC to shut down for a year to address safety concerns

Indeed. It surprised me reading this BBC article, as we hadn't heard anything along those lines here at CERN. In fact, the Director General sent a note (http://press.web.cern.ch/press/lhc-first-physics/msg-dg-1003...) to all CERN personnel, very much cheerful about the future, without mentioning any kind of unforeseen interruption in operations.

All levels of management at CERN are very open, both about successes and failures. Even more so about the latter: bad news travel fast and all that (and we are a quite close community here on-site).

So he needed only 4 tweets to make a coherent argument on Tweeter. Not bad.

In light of this, could someone change the title?

so it was never intended to run at full power without further engineering? or is the article wrong about it staying at half power?

from the article: So they have taken the decision to run the machine for 18 to 24 months at half-maximum power before switching it off for a year ...

I don't think that it would be someone (or something) traveling back from the future to sabotage the LHC. Rather, it's possible that the LHC, if fully operational, would destroy the universe, and we just happen to live in one of many universes in which hardware failures and birds dropping baguettes have prevented it from doing so.

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/space/13lhc.html?_... :

A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the [Large Hadron] collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

With each delay, the theory becomes a hair less fanciful.